I'm saying it would be better to buy higher quality ships at a lower price from places like Japan or South Korea (who are very good at shipbuilding) than to have a few struggling ship yards that only exist because a federal law outright bans competition from running them out of business.

I'm also pointing out that the national security argument doesn't hold water because being able to construct a small ship every couple of years is not going to be useful if we encounter a period where we need to build hundreds of vessels per year. We'd have to build that infrastructure from the ground up like we did in WW2. We'd have to do this whether or not the Jones Act is in place.

Therefore, I think it's better to scrap the Jones Act entirely. It's all cost, no benefit.

I do think it likely there's a big difference in ability to respond to a crisis between "we have some capacity and expertise, but need more" and "we have no capacity or expertise, and need more", but admittedly I don't know how crucial having the right knowledge & existing systems/processes to copy, is for spinning up new shipyards. I would expect "copy this shipyard and have the experts there train others" would go a lot faster and have far better outcomes than "build a shipyard from scratch with no easily-accessible reference or expert trainers".

That'd be the a big part of the argument for the value of preserving even a wildly insufficient level of manufacturing capability for certain vital goods, I'd expect—that is, it may not be necessary that the effect is to have a large and thriving shipbuilding industry, for it to still be worth it.

That’s very much the case, especially as wars destroy resources over time. Starting with a huge fleet of ships on day 1 isn’t that useful by year 5.

> I'm saying it would be better to buy higher quality ships at a lower price from places like Japan or South Korea (who are very good at shipbuilding)

What the last ~3 years have taught us is that a country should not have critical dependencies on another country. The keywords for the first part of the 21st century will be Deglobalization and aging societies, better buckle up.

I don't think having 200+ individual autarkies is going to produce net benefits for humanity. Really, the once in a century pandemic is worth having the other 99 years of high efficiency supply chains.

I think people's opinions on this are largely divided over whether they think the current ~75 years of peace (more or less—cold war's not a hot war, and limited proxy wars aren't world wars) between major powers is likely to continue. The pandemic was a tiny fraction as disruptive as a major war would be, and we struggled to handle that—if one expects a higher frequency of trade disruption in the coming decades than in the past few, reducing reliance on foreign trade might be a reasonable position.

The reserve is uselessly small. Crucially, if the line about ships having to be built in the US was repealed, the reserve would become a lot bigger.

The Jones Act has more than one requirement, and while some of them are useful, others very much are not.

Some sufficiently small n is indistinguishable from zero at the national scale. "Something is better than nothing" needs to be measurable and worth the cost, otherwise it's virtue-signaling.

If WWIII started I'm sure the US government would have no qualm about commandeering the ships in US harbours and/or US waters.

That’s helpful on day 1, not so much by year 6.

It’s vastly faster to start with a small team that knows how to build stuff and expand that team than it is to start completely from scratch. But you can only maintain that knowledge by actually building stuff.

So yes it’s inefficient in peacetime, but so is having the worlds most powerful military. It’s silly to spend that kind of money on a military and then leave easily exploitable weakness in our logistics.

Short term is all that'd be needed. The US economy turned into a war economy would have no problem churning cargo ships if needed.

Peacetime subsidies are only useful for capabilities that would be prohibitively costly or long to setup un time of war.

Time is just one dimension here, cost in peacetime is the other dimension.

Also the act aids not just in building ships but also managing, maintaining, and crewing them. The skills and lessons learned over time of a domestic industry vs a ~0.2% increase in boat shipping costs is worth considering. Especially as most do these costs relate to paying US workers and US taxes.

I wouldn’t expect WWIII to last that long. Plus ships are big expensive floating targets of no particular use in a total war between nuclear powers.

>I wouldn’t expect WWIII to last that long. People said the same about WWI and look how that ended up.

WWI was fantastically destructive war of 4 short years, which is very short for a war. 'People' always underestimate the cost of war when selling the idea to the public. Imagine if they were realistic then maybe we wouldn't go to war.

I'm not suggesting WWIII would be short because someone wins it, just that if a nuclear exchange happens there won't be enough left to keep fighting with.

It's not a given that WW3 would escalate into nuclear soon. All sides understand that once you go there, there's no way back. But there are still goals that can be achieved and territories that can be contested without resorting to nukes, and without making one's opponent desperate enough to do the same.

Of course, this presumes rational actors on all sides, which is very much not a given (esp. looking at Russia right now).

I think it’s unsafe to assume rational actors. Especially when Russians, Chinese and Americans are involved.

I don't think it's safe to assume, either. But it's definitely a possibility.

I think there is some ambiguity here.

An India vs Pakistan war could continue after a nuclear exchange as they don’t have that many nuclear weapons to glass each other and survivors would presumably want vengeance.

For the US it might take a reasonably effective missile defense system, but that’s not outside the realm of possibility.

I wouldn't classify India vs Pakistan as a world war. The primary nuclear belligerents would be US and Russia. I wouldn't trust the US military industrial complex to be honest about their missile defence capabilities and it worries me that the west is being so cavalier about possible nuclear war.

To be clear, I was suggesting an India vs Pakistan nuclear exchange could be part of a much larger conflict. WWII was called a world war because so many countries where involved and WWIII could similarly spiral even without a US vs Russia nuclear exchange.

Anyway, I personally don’t believe the US has a highly effective nuclear defense system, but even the possibility of such changes the calculus of war. The more bombs you need to send to each target the fewer targets you can hit. DC and NYC are presumably fucked either way, but Tuscaloosa Alabama could easily survive the second scenario.

It’s completely theoretical at this point, but coming up for plausible scenarios where the Jones Act ends up worthwhile doesn’t seem that difficult.

My expectation is the coming conflict will be between NATO and a Chinese Russian alliance. The US maintains its current standard of living based on cheap Chinese goods, cheap Russian energy (indirectly) and financialization. I expect that none of those things will survive such a conflict. Even if a city avoids getting nuked what life is left for them. Maybe they could get a job at Foxconn.

That’s a common misconception, just over 1/5th of US imports come from China.

The US is a net energy exporter.

Simply look at how much damage the Russian Ukraine war is doing to the US and that is relatively a minor skirmish that the US is not even directly involved with.

The Russian Ukraine war is doing approximately nothing to the US.

Tougher to do if you're not at war yet, but the countries pulling your (well, their) cargo ships away are.

Them and what navy?

I guess you can seize foreign-flagged ships as a non-combatant state, but I expect you'll become a combatant pretty soon, if you do too much of it. Nb these countries reducing availability of (their!) shipping capacity to the US during a war could include allies and neutral countries, not just enemies and likely enemies.

The article says there are less than 100 eligible Jones Act ships.

Oceangoing ships. There are thousands upon thousands of tugs and barges moving unfathomable numbers of bulk goods up and down the mississippi, along the intercoastal waterways every day.

Why can't the military take over this role?